Note 28 — LECTURE II. THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS.

The pages of the excellent Notes and Queries would no doubt be open to receive such, and in them they might be safely garnered up. That there are such proverbs to reward him who should carefully watch for them, is abundantly proved by the immense addition, which, as I shall have occasion hereafter to mention, a Spanish scholar was able to make to the collected proverbs, so numerous before, of Spain. Nor do there want other indications of the like kind. Thus, the editor of very far the best modern collection of German proverbs, records this one, found, as he affirms, in no preceding collection, and by himself never heard but once, and then from the lips of an aged lay servitor of a monastery in the Black Forest: Offend one monk, and the lappets of all cowls will flutter as far as Rome; (Beleidigestu einen Münch, so knappen alle Kuttenzipfel bis nach Rom;) and yet who can doubt that we have a genuine proverb here, and one excellently expressive of the common cause which the whole of the monastic orders, despite their inner dissensions, made ever, when assailed from without, with one another? It is very easy to be deceived in such a matter, and one must be content often to be so; but the following, which is current in Ireland, I have never seen in print: “The man on the dyke always hurls well;” the looker-on at a game of hurling, seated indolently on the wall, always imagines that he could improve on the strokes of the actual players, and, if you will listen to him, would have played the game much better than they; a proverb of sufficiently wide application.